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Native visionOS platform support

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Re: Native visionOS platform support

#311

Post by tim-- »

tim-- wrote: post #301
mattlondon wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the problem I think: porting. As I understand things, proton allows windows games to just work (pun intended) on Linux. No porting, no rebuild - just download and run. Who is going to bother doing all the extra work to port their game for Mac?! Time and time again there have been loads of articles on here over the years with developers saying it is simply not worth the hassle to support Linux and Mac.

Despite the name, the GPTK isn't just a porting toolkit. It contains a version of Wine that is specifically patched to pass DirectX calls to Metal. There is a relatively easy way for a player to use GPTK to run games from their Steam library on Mac. Here is how to use Apple's Game Porting Toolkit to install Wine & Steam. 1. Go to https://github.com/installaware/AGPT and download & run the installer 2. Go to https://s…

(There's also Mythic, which I forgot the name of https://getmythic.app/)

Re: Native visionOS platform support

#312

Post by jayd16 »

arghwhat wrote: post #258
jayd16 wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure you can. That said, I'm not sure what Apple's usual style is and it might be pretty out of character (or not) to drop support shortly after an MR.

No you can't. Upstreaming a large feature like this requires at the very least allocating a number of manweeks to the upstreaming process, and that's without accounting for actually writing the feature in the first place. Making a PR and not following up would be worse PR (heh) than doing nothing, which is also costly. If they had dumped a tarball or a fork somewhere with a hacked up PoC it could have looked like the…

Nothing about what you said binds Apple to following through. Just because it would be a bad idea doesn't mean they can't or won't.

Re: Native visionOS platform support

#313

Post by dangus »

commakozzi wrote: post #283
asadotzler wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest thing restraining it is the ergonomics and form factor. No one wants face PCs. Imagine how women, who are half the population, and who spend 0.5T dollars a year on hair and makeup products, are going to deal with smashing a 1.5 pound PC into their faces and held in place with straps around their head and hair. SJ would have smothered that thing in the crib the second his team had no answer for how a produ…

I want a face PC, if it's a VisionPro; just can't afford one. My wife wants one more than I do. Two counter-examples for you there.

1. That's an anecdote, but you know that. I'm going to guess that the wife of someone on this forum is nerdier than average.

2. Even if you WANT a face PC, that doesn't mean you'll love using it and keep it once the honeymoon wears off. Supposedly over half of VR headset owners use their device less than once per month.

I used to want a headset. I bought a Valve Index. Everything about the device was fantastic. The games were fantastic. But then I sold it about 6 months later because, meh, it's just not something that was practical and usable frequently enough.

So right now we have basically ideal headsets Meta Quest 3/3S which are excellent, dirt cheap, lightweight, and have a large software catalog but they still struggle to retain users and grow the market.

The Vision Pro hasn't even resolved motion sickness for 100% of users. You can love it and still be forced to discontinue use one by something you can't control about your own body.

Re: Native visionOS platform support

#314

Post by oofManBang »

parasubvert wrote: post #295
oofManBang wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Man, I don't even bother using the ultra-wide monitor on my desk . The screen on my laptop can already display orders of magnitude far more information than I can easily process at one time. Even with contexts where I'm comfortable managing windows/buffers manually (e.g. emacs) there's simply too much space to easily manage. What do you do with all that space? Is it just pulling up every possible resources at once so…

And yet I have people constantly telling me how they have four monitors set ups and still not enough screen real estate… and this is why they don’t like the Vision Pro, which can only give you one big ultra wide max.

I've yet to meet someone with strong preference for screen real estate that could back it up with productivity. Sometimes people just want stimulation.

Edit: i have no gripe with these people, I just simply don't buy that they're more productive. We all need our comforts. Mine is music.

Re: Native visionOS platform support

#315

Post by oofManBang »

freeopinion wrote: post #302
oofManBang wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> While the Apple Vision Pro itself is not a good ... product I must admit I'm baffled by this reaction to the first model: * It's clearly far more impressive technologically than any competitor. * The price point clearly indicates it wasn't aimed at the general consumer, which is normal for such a massive technological leap compared to their other recent consumer stuff (e.g. the apple watch). * They got loads of fee…

> Battery alone precludes this. Even just streaming video back and forth is going to be too power-hungry for serious use with lightweight glasses. I know this is obvious, but the battery doesn't have to go in the glasses. When the glasses are just a wireless monitor, it opens up all sorts of possibilities for belttop computers. Obviously, the glasses still need some power, but the battery can be very small, comparati…

Googling "belttop" just shows belts. To what are you referring? Are you suggesting wiring the glasses to some battery stored elsewhere? Sure you can do that, but I thought people these days hated wires (in spite of an objectively superior interface to wireless). But you certainly can't power streaming for it (for more than say an hour) with the battery you can actually store in glasses.

I've never even heard of an iVert.

> Plus people shell out $600 for the glasses

I want to sell these people a bridge. Pray tell me where I can find them because their money is absolutely begging to be taken for a pittance. Who the fuck is paying $600 for $5 of plastic?

Edit: i realize i only addressed part of your comment. I think I get that you're trying to convey an iVert as an apple product, right?

> Now you can charge $3000 for you VR kit, but claim it only costs $2400. Plus people shell out $600 for the glasses even though they don't have the CPU. They just want to look like they do. Or they buy multiple pairs for different locations or as backups or whatever. The profit on the glasses could be huge. Especially if they could replace the Apple Watch for some people.

Do we have evidence they aren't subsidizing this? If you can't look at production cost this speculation seems useless. And to claim that $2400 is any more within the realm of affordability is insane. If they actually wanted normal people to bite they'd have priced it at ~$700. This is for rich people and reviewers only.

Re: Native visionOS platform support

#316

Post by karmakaze »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #211
karmakaze wrote: post #170

The interesting thing here is that Apple finally learned that games matter. Of course they go about it in the same "we're never wrong" attitude by never admitting it, like how their mice don't have two physical buttons to stay true to "a mouse should have one button" from the original Mac. They're learning though, it was voluntary unlike USB-C on their phones/tablets.

There are exactly zero people in the video game industry working on speculative AVP games. The ones who are thinking about it are not hesitating due to Godot support.

That's the situation now. It will be different when Godot is supported and the Apple Vision Air is released. Then anyone making VR games/apps will have a new target using standard (though less popular than Unity/UE5) development tooling. It will self-select those who find this reasonable.

Re: Native visionOS platform support

#317

Post by dangus »

surajrmal wrote: post #187
tormeh wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because DirectX is a success and Metal is not. If Apple wanted Metal to be a success then they'd need Windows devices to support it, and ideally a console too (like DirectX with Xbox). There's a lot of bad things you can say about Vulkan's market position relative to DirectX, but it's clearly more successful than Metal. More games and work applications are written in it. I don't see what Apple gains from going their…

Even without a standard, people will create abstractions on top so all you need to do is add support to those abstractions. If needing to conform to a standard was hampering Apple's ability to get developers to make software for their platforms they would add support. It's obviously not materially affecting them.

I think this whole thread is besides the point anyway.

VisionOS doesn't support VR gaming at a basic controller level. All it can do is the same traditional console controllers that other Apple devices support (PlayStation, Switch, Xbox, etc).

Metal vs. DirectX vs. Vulkan isn't the problem, the basic input devices and lack of interoperability with other non-graphics VR tooling/SDKs are the problem.

I know that Apple doesn't see it as a gaming device and mostly sucks at interfacing with the non-mobile gaming sphere, but if they had come out of the gate with messaging that was more like "We have built-in support for popular VR controllers, game developers can just do XYZ simple thing to port their games to VisionOS," they would have had some immediate momentum to help bolster the other select few things the device excels at.

But as it stands, nobody can make any of the kinds of abstractions you are referring to because the hardware is not capable of using the basic input devices that VR games depend on. Full stop.

Instead, prospective buyers are almost certainly comparing the Vision Pro with devices like the Meta Quest Pro and thinking "well, the Apple thing does some Apple stuff that nothing else can do, but I can't even play any occasional VR games on my Vision Pro and it's literally the most expensive headset money can buy."

The truth of the matter is that a Quest 3 can do pass-through vision, VR web content, and web browsing along with a decent selection of non-gaming apps at a tiny fraction of the cost of a Vision Pro and you don't even lose all that much due to it being less premium and advanced.

Even if we are comparing against a hypothetical $999 future Vision device where the external battery is gone and it weighs less it still doesn't compare all that well in that context. An analogy would be like if the iPhone wasn't allowed to make video calls and Android was. Maybe I don't use video calling every day but I can't justify buying a phone that doesn't have a feature like that as a concept.

IMO Apple thinks that controlling the device with just the hands and no controllers is the future. They feel like they have the iPhone all over again and that all the competitors using the metaphorical stylus and built-in keyboard are wrong. But as we found out with the iPad, sometimes a specialized input device (Apple Pencil) does serve a specific subset of customers very well to the point where it's considered a basic necessity.

Re: Native visionOS platform support

#318

Post by oofManBang »

asadotzler wrote: post #259
oofManBang wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> While the Apple Vision Pro itself is not a good ... product I must admit I'm baffled by this reaction to the first model: * It's clearly far more impressive technologically than any competitor. * The price point clearly indicates it wasn't aimed at the general consumer, which is normal for such a massive technological leap compared to their other recent consumer stuff (e.g. the apple watch). * They got loads of fee…

>* It's clearly far more impressive technologically than any competitor. Technology hardly makes a product. >The price point clearly indicates it wasn't aimed at the general consumer, You don't put your CEO on the cover of Vanity Fair and devote half your retail space and staff to it if it's not for the general consumer. >* They got loads of feedback Not as much as they hoped. They hoped to have 500K units in the wil…

[flagged]

Re: Native visionOS platform support

#319

Post by oofManBang »

SirBill wrote: post #239
oofManBang wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Man, I don't even bother using the ultra-wide monitor on my desk . The screen on my laptop can already display orders of magnitude far more information than I can easily process at one time. Even with contexts where I'm comfortable managing windows/buffers manually (e.g. emacs) there's simply too much space to easily manage. What do you do with all that space? Is it just pulling up every possible resources at once so…

I find the extra space useful over just a laptop screen for coding - I can have a simulator to one side, and a coding window open with a good amount of space for metadata sidebars, along with a window or two for code documentation. Where it really shines though is for photo review and editing. There it is spectacular to have so much space for image review even with a good number of adjustment controls up. The other t…

I appreciate the insight. I definitely understand why you might prefer this, especially with the in flight example and the photo editing. The one example I came up with internally was video editing/viewing, which seems to align quite well.

Re: Native visionOS platform support

#320

Post by [deleted] »

asadotzler wrote: post #262
halJordan wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thats a very naive understanding of success. Youre telling the soap maker on etsy doesnt have a successful product because she doesnt sell a million units a day? Youre telling me that Rolls Royce Aerospace isn't successful because they only 100 aircraft engines a year?

That soap maker didn't spend $10B in R&D figuring out how to make the soap. Your retort makes zero sense. Apple's worst products sold tens of millions of units in their first couple of years while Vision Pro sold about 370K units in year 1 and well into year 2 still has plenty of inventory sitting on warehouse shelves to cover all of 2025 demand. It literally bombed in the market. It's an abject failure of a product…

[deleted]
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